I realized it’s been awhile since I did one of my Design Spotlight posts. It is about time to highlight a noteworthy design, isn’t it?
Today I would like to ponit you toward Web Design Ledger, a design blog I’ve started reading recently. Designed by Henry Jones (Henry Jones the designer, not the adventurer. At least, I think… 
), it’s fairly simplistic and clean, but the style just looks great.
Web Design Ledger is one of those designs that isn’t jaw-droppingly amazing, but is more subtle. It’s clean and simple, which score it big points, and it’s full of little details that really make the design.
Some of the little touches I like about it are the background, which you don’t really notice at first, the big buttons along the top, and the styling of the “Recent Comments” column, with it’s subtle word bubble shaping.
I like the use of thumbnails, both in the content column and in the sidebar. I also noticed that there are default category thumbnails (or so it seems, anyway) that appear when a post doesn’t have an associated thumbnail, something that I’ve been planning to add to Webmaster-Source in the near future, so I don’t have to worry about creating an icon for every single post I write, which would be a little bit too much work for my liking, since I write daily and not necessarily every post I write needs a unique image. The general idea is “if this post doesn’t have a thumbnail, check the category and display the default thumbnail for that category.”
The comments section looks a little bland though. I think the addition of Gravatar support would liven them up a bit, and make it easier to differentiate between commenters, something that a name alone doesn’t always do. (When you scroll through a comment thread, do you look at everyone’s name, to see who’s saying what?)
One minor suggestion involves the area with the RSS/email subscription links. As it stands, it looks pretty good, and looks like it does the job (namely, letting people subscribe to the blog) pretty well. However, I don’t see the standard RSS icon anywhere. It’s a widely used convention, and probably one worth following. Also, a lot of people in the web design, development, and blogging fields are in to Twitter. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to offer a Twitter feed as a subscription option, maybe supplemented with some occasional “tweets.” It may bring in some more people, or encourage existing readers to drop by the site more often. Just a thought.
Overall Web Design Ledger has a fabulous design, and some great articles. If you’re reading this, keep u pthe good work.
